Ethnic Identity as Process: The Ethnic Self and Other as Perceived by Scots in Hamilton (original) (raw)
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Ethnic Identity as Process: The Ethnic Self and
2016
In this thesis, I present ethnic identity as one aspect of a multifaceted personal identity, subject to constant change through processes of construction and re-construction occuring within specific social, historical, economic and political contexts. My analysis is based on fieldwork interviews conducted with Scots in Hamilton, Ontario, who migrated to Canada after World War II. Two primary themes emerged from respondents' statements concerning migration and settlement in Canada. The first concerns changes in self-identification occurring in relation to processes of migration. The salience of in-group differences decreases for Scots with migrat ion to Canada, accompanied by an increased identification with a perceived Scottish collectivity in Canada.
RUSSIAN JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS
In Britain the conflict between the national standard and regional languages and varieties, or rather those perceived to be 'only' a dialect, is still going strong and Scots plays a peculiar role in it. It is recognised and afforded a certain level of protection and promotion under the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages (ECRML). While related to English, Scots has a number of regional varieties and it stands in competition with other varieties of English within Scotland. NorthEast Scots (NE Scots), also known as 'the Doric', in particular occupies a rather special place within the sphere of Scots. While research has often focused on the perceived status of urban versus rural Scots, this paper examines the attitudes towards NE Scots with regard to identity construction as displayed by its speakers in rural areas and small towns in the NorthEast. Another focal point is the use of the regional variety as a perceived act of resistance against the ostensible dominance of English. Within the mind of its speakers what kind of identity do they feel they have-a largely local/regional, a national Scottish, a British one or something entirely different? The analysis of interview data highlights that respondents' statements and their actual linguistic behaviour reinforce the affirmation of their regional identity; the extent to which this occurs will also be investigated.
Sociological Research Online, 2006
This qualitative study investigates the relationship between race and nation in an ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Glasgow, Scotland. It finds that Scottishness has a historically founded racialised referent at the level of the neighbourhood but that this referent is undermined in everyday life by syncretic codes of cultural belonging represented by signifiers such as accent, dress and mannerisms. However, these cultural signifiers that contest the racialised referent are, on occasions, themselves challenged by negative ascriptions such as terrorist and extremist which reinforce, though never completely, the original racialised referent of Scottishness as whiteness. We conclude that whiteness is an unstable identifier of Scottishness, and Scottishness is an unstable identifier of whiteness, such that a negative view of Islam as antithetical to imagined conceptions of Scottishness, cannot easily be sustained in areas of relatively high racialised minority settlement.
“Canadian-First”: Mixed Race Self-Identification and Canadian Belonging
Not being read or identified by others as “Canadian” was a common thread in semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted with 19 young adults of mixed race in a Western Canadian urban context. In this paper, I address moments of (in)ability for people of mixed race to claim “Canadian.” Mixed race people have a complex relationship with identifying and narrating their identities as “Canadian” through the operation of race and ethnicity in the Canadian context, and because of ambivalent and contradictory readings of their bodies. I found that they deploy the term in three ways: by expressing a sense of being “Canadian-first,” by stating that there exists an understanding that “Canadian means white,” and by strategically using the term “Canadian” in their interactions with others, signaling an active appropriation of the term. However, none of these deployments are mutually exclusive: they overlap and bleed into each other, playing off and impacting one another. This paper adds to nascent Canadian Critical Mixed Race studies and also redresses a gap in the literature on “Canadian identity” by examining how the ability to claim “Canadian” is racialized through a consideration of the experiences of mixed race people.
Negotiating Ethnic Identity In Canada
Youth & Society, 2003
Satellite children are children of ethnically Chinese immigrants to North America who have returned to their country of origin after immigration. Based on interview transcripts of 68 adolescent satellite children, an analysis on the negotiation of ethnic identity was performed using the NUD*IST software. The analysis showed multiple ways of ethnic identity negotiation, ranging from an essentialist approach to differentiation and to confusion. Existing approaches to theoretical conceptualization are critically examined, drawing implications for practice.
Cognitive Journeys to Cultural Identity: The Maclean Story
aicomos.com
And having been in Scotland we spent a couple of months there a couple of years ago a lot of the Scottish people aren't as identifiably Scottish or as interested as the people are here (Interviewee 12: 23/06/00, Maclean NSW) ... Abstract A track or pathway is the ...
Canada, a Fertile Ground for Intergroup Relations and Social Identity Theory
Peace Psychology Book Series, 2016
Social identity theory (SIT) has impacted Canadian social psychology since its inception, and it is noteworthy that some Canadian social psychologists were of some infl uence in its development. This mutual infl uence began when Henri Tajfel (University of Bristol) had a visiting appointment at the University of Western Ontario in 1964 where he collaborated with Robert Gardner (e.g. Tajfel, Sheikh, & Gardner, 1964). Then in the early 1970s, Donald Taylor (who trained with Gardner) from McGill regularly visited the University of Bristol where he formed intellectual alliances with Howard Giles, Rupert Brown, and John Turner. As part of the McGill-Bristol exchange, Richard Bourhis (UQAM), a McGill graduate, went on to do his PhD with Giles, but he also collaborated with Tajfel (Bourhis, Giles, & Tajfel, 1973) and later with Turner (Turner & Bourhis, 1996). Taylor and Bourhis were active collaborators with Giles, and much of their work focused on issues of language and ethnicity. While early work on Canadian social identity issues was summarily dismissed by certain social psychologists as being of borderline relevance (Rule & Wells, 1981), this view was countered by a seminal book entitled A Canadian Social Psychology of Ethnic Relations. This book, edited by Gardner and Rudy Kalin (1981), germinated while they were both on sabbatical leave at the University of Bristol in 1976. In this chapter we revisit some of the intergroup issues identifi ed by Gardner and Kalin through the lens of SIT (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and the social identity approach (Hogg & Abrams, 1988). We discuss three different Canadian contexts of intergroup relations that offer a fertile ground for SIT. The fi rst context is that of Aboriginal Canadians and their evolving relationship with non-Aboriginal Canadians. The second context focuses on French-English relations, as their history and languages lay the foundation